She uses them like a temporary bookmark. Something she wants to read, but not right now. But once she's read it, she doesn't want to keep it.

It's kind of this middle ground between a bookmark and a tab, so people end up using tabs and then complain that the browser is slow or that it loses stuff when it crashes or Windows does a surprise update.

Tabs Outliner + The Great Suspender are a perfect combo for this. Tabs Outliner keeps a session history going that is very reliable and has saved my ass from Chrome crashing several times. The Great Suspender "sleeps" a tab while it's not being used so it doesn't use up RAM. Keeps every thing nice and speedy.

If you're using a different tab, the other is considered idle. You can easily mark a tab as being exempt from being put to sleep, exclude pinned tabs, and other options. You can also whitelist domains so they never sleep. I don't recall ever having a YouTube tab put to sleep while it was actively playing a video.

I use a similar extension for Firefox called Auto Unload Tab. One of its defaults options is that it doesn’t unload a tab if it’s playing any media. Another one is it doesn’t unload pinned tabs (I have a pinned tab with my email, so it works nicely with the desktop notifications).

The main functionality of The Great Suspender is now built-in to the latest Chrome versions for the past year or so. Type in chrome://discards in your url bar to "discard" tabs (i.e. free their memory, but keep them visible in the tab bar).

It's so nice being able to go 2-3 weeks back and see exactly what you had issues with and the websites that helped solve problems. Websites that would probably not have gone into my bookmarks list because it seemed insignificant in the moment.

If she has an ebooks reader there are a number of addons that sends the text of the Web page to your Kindle for later reading. They work really well for long articles etc. I use "push to Kindle" but there are plenty of orhers

Wouldn't it make sense, then, to add a feature to handle this use case?

Like a "read later" button. (It could be done by holding down the bookmark star button, so no new UI needs to be added, but that would make it undiscoverable... anyway, better people than me can figure out the UI.) It saves the link to a read later folder, and whenever you click on something in that folder it is automatically removed from the list (you can press the read later button again of course if you want to come back to it, or just bookmark it permanently if necessary).

The problem with 'read later' is striking a balance between immediacy and minimalism. You want to keep things in sight and in reach, otherwise you won't read them later. But you also don't want the functionality to be in the way of anything.

The best example of this is mozilla's 'pocket' it was supposed to be exactly what you described. But for the average user, something like that comes off as another hassle to learn without knowing if it will even be useful.

I guess so too, even 5 tabs are too much for chrome and everything is laggy while firefox can handle it well. Too bad I actually really like chrome :( but the team does not seem to care about that issue.

The problem is usability. Chrome/Chromium doesn’t allow sideway scrolling of tabs in the tab-bar and just makes the tabs smaller and smaller until not even the icon shows anymore. With Firefox you can configure the minimum tab width and it just adds those little arrows on the side to scroll sideways.

I don't know about 1691, but I usually have anywhere from 200 to 500 tabs open at any given time, often between two or three windows. This usually happens when redditing or reading Hacker News (middle-click on a link to read it later), or if I'm in the midst of writing software or something and have a whole bunch of search results and documentation pages open.

Tab Groups is dead in the water due to FF57 dropping non-WebExtensions plugins. The Simplified Tab Groups developer said they intend to make it work with WebExtensions, but I have no idea how given the missing APIs.

I've been trying to code a replacement from the ground up for WebExtensions, but... I use Tab Groups because I have so many projects going on and I like to have them all grouped, so I don't really have time to build a replacement myself, let alone maintain/update it.

I'm always the guy that had 50 tabs open on Firefox. Usually things I want to reference later. About once a week I have to purge my tabs list to my most common 10. You are right, half the stuff you save to look at later, never gets viewed again

Problem with porn is that incognito pages aren't protected by Firefox's "restore tabs on crash/close" feature. I mean, I get why, I just wish I could, say, flag a particular incognito page that I've left in the background to re-open with the rest of Firefox, just this once.

My question is: how do you manage (well) over 1000 tabs with a standard horizontal tab display? My tab count is normally measured only in the dozens, and I can't even come close to being able to deal with that without the tree style tabs extension.

That's fair, I guess I didn't think of tab groups because the image in the article didn't show them. I actually might have to give that a shot...love the side tabs but not as big a fan of the real estate they sacrifice

I find tabs more useful than bookmarks with tree style tabs enabled. Being able to organize sites by the parent page that you linked into them from is super useful. Bookmarks don't really give you that.

One more underrated feature of Firefox: it never loses data. Due to my line of work my laptop crashes all the time. Firefox never fails to restore all tabs correctly, while Chrome does it way too often. Long lingering tabs are basically a personal bookmark database and it's so frustrating to lose it that I live by a rule never to keep an important tab in Chrome.

Yeah, I was going to say the same. I've created similarly stupid loops before and each time it was just a case of fixing the code and carrying on in a new tab until the old tab became responsive enough to close or reuse. Or kill the one frozen tab in Chrome's task manager. That should never bring down the whole browser, that's half the point of Chrome's (and now Firefox's) multi-process architecture.

It's really good at that, but I have lost all my tabs a couple times in the past. Usually what will happen is that it will load up the right number of tabs, but they'll all be blank, with empty URLs, and nothing in the recovery options that will bring them back.

I've had Firefox completely lose a session after a crash. Reopen on just the home page. Most irritating. But I shrugged and moved on with my life. Next time I opened Firefox, it was back (plus the tabs I'd opened since).

Part of that is by design. Chrome has hash checks on its settings file to prevent 3rd parties from altering the homepage, search, etc. Unfortunately, that means if anything at all changes unexpectedly in that settings file, Chrome just wipes it. So your settings, your homepage, your default search, and all your extension settings are just wiped with no warning. You'll see a message about Chrome needing to restore settings if you go into Settings afterwards. It severely hindered working on Chrome Portable for PortableApps.com. It also means you can't move your Chrome profile from your old PC to your new one when you upgrade. And your backup of your profile is useless unless restored to the same PC its on right now.

No one should use Chrome unless logged into their Google account with everything set to sync. Doesn't matter whether local or portable. Otherwise you risk losing data.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from (questionably accurate, I admit) info I've found on the Internet, that isn't such a big problem with SSDs nowadays. It still reduces its lifetime, but not enough to be worried that much.

You're right. The worst I saw firefox do is 5MB every 15 seconds. This would be 1.2GB/hour, 9GB per 8 hours, 3337GB/year. This is acceptable nowadays. Still, not very nice - so there was a bug filed for this explicit reason.

I re-checked disk activity now. Fortunately, newer versions (54.0.1) seem to have fixed the "bug" - I see orders of magnitude less data written to disk per hour. Nevermind, I've simply changed the interval from 15s to something high, following this article.

At 9-12GB/day for Firefox and 24GB/day for Chrome, I'd rather leave more headroom for my other uses of the SSD. Also, as a programmer, I think this is something that can be amended with some code. I might look into it, actually.

You can change that period. I set mine to two minutes, and changed the cache size when it saves from the default (about 300M) to less than 100M, which has helped a lot. The size of the cache as reduced the number of session files it saves from many tens of thousands to something it can handle a lot faster.

The only downside I have seen so far is that when the browser crashes, what gets recovered may miss out the very latest tab you opened, though that's no biggie.

I'm really happy to see this article and know that I'm not the only one who makes heavy usage of a lot of open tabs. Everyone always gasps when they see my work machine, and I have to ell them that's nothing compared to my home system...

In May I upgraded firefox to 45 ESR. As the article proves, I too always felt that each upgrade was handling my tabs worse, and in fact version 45 wouldn't even start up (it kept crashing) until I created a new profile and copied my session into it. Unfortunately it bombed out on my earlier this week and for some reason none of the recent saved profiles contained more than about 1/4 of my tabs. This included tabs that I hadn't used for awhile, but it also included a number of tabs that I use on a daily basis, so I'm not sure why they didn't get saved in the session files. Unfortunately firefox CAN lose data at times, and this isn't the first time I've had this happen.

I finally had to grab the session from my previous FF version in May. I've lost a few things that had recently been opened, but it was the best starting point I could find, which is odd considering I usually have to restart it every couple weeks. And for those wondering, my 'obnoxious' amount of tabs from the profile I just restarted is 4 windows and 245 tabs. I don't feel so bad now that I've seen OP's numbers. :-)

I don't know if it's my laptop that is unique but for me it's always the reverse. My Firefox crashed with measly 8 tabs and my Chrome is still going strong with 160+ tabs, not counting tabs on my mobile apps which after 99 tabs I don't know how to count it anymore. I never understand about people mocking Chrome for RAM usage or crashing all the time.

I typically have 50+ tabs going at any one time. The plugin called "The Great Suspender" has been great at keeping RAM usage down. It "sleeps" a tab if it goes unused for a certain amount of time and is very customizable.

Chrome tab loss occurs very rarely, it's true that I have a little more confidence over the restoration behavior of the fox but I still use Chrome daily (with recurrent "crashes" because my Thinkpad wakes up at nights to spy on me and fails to suspend again properly)

I know you're not going to start using chrome again but if you lose your tabs you can actually restore them. Ctrl+shift+T will restore all the lost tabs. I do this if my computer crashes and it works with no problems.

You literally used the word "bookmark" in your description. Why don't you just use a damn bookmark? And what kind of stuff do you actually have in these tabs? I rarely have more than 15 tabs open and I'm a software dev that opens a lot of tabs

I have an astonishing amount of tabs, bookmarking each one of them is an insurmountable task. I opened each and every one of them, with the exception of some Youtube and Twitter pages, for a reason.

I take a day, maybe once every 2 months, and clean up. Most of the tab history reflects exactly what I did 3 weeks ago, dealing with that very hard task. That tab history that might have otherwise been lost, I find some weeks later cleaning my list.

My point is, we all work differently. You're pretty tidy with your 15 tabs, ok, you're not the audience for stuff like tree-style tabs or session managers. I am a very untidy person when it comes to computers, give me a problem and I will give you 500 tabs worth of knowledge that will help me solve the problem. No bookmarks, because I am never sure in the moment if something is important enough later down the road.

Not sure if this is related, but in the past week or so my Firefox turns to complete shit if I've got a YouTube tab open. I'll have music playing in the background from one of the tabs, and if I go back to it after a while (eg: to change song), it takes 5+ seconds to render the page, my mouse lags along the screen, button presses often don't register or if they do, takes literally 10 seconds to actually do anything.

If you are using the new look of Youtube which are implemented in web components, this may be the point because Firefox does not implement web components yet. Youtube only use some polyfills if features are absent.

Hmm, I left this running for half an hour while I was browsing some other tabs/getting some work done. Seemed to run fine when I clicked back to it, and I have a much weaker computer than yours. Might be worth a bug report.

Probably. Firefox 55 will hit the release channel in about 2-3 weeks, and its improvements to startup, performance, and memory usage are significant.

It is actually like a two version jump compared to v54 because it spent twice as long as normal in the development cycle. They were eliminating the "Aurora" release channel, so when v54 went from Aurora to Beta they just kept working on v55 instead of moving it to Aurora and starting v56.

Chrome still has some advantages, especially (and unsurprisingly) on Google properties like Maps. That said, they are shrinking fast. Mozilla has been identifying and eliminating a number of (often small but frequent) hiccups from things like their JS engine, the system that scans text for the spell checker, the system that decides whether a section of the page needs to be recalculated. Maps and Google Apps are better on Firefox now than they ever have been.

In Firefox's win column, better tab management, better handling of large numbers of tabs, lower memory usage, and that warm feeling you get knowing you still have at least some buffer between you and Google's tentacles.

I've yet to find a convenient session manager with sane sync and export, though :/

Session Manager doesn't export in an externally readable format and Firefox Sync isn't clear about the direction of syncing between devices and doesn't allow to keep some history in case the new device being synced to can't handle the profile being synced.

Actually Photon is completely performance related, because it's not very useful to have a fast browser if it doesn't feel fast. This is one of the governing principles of the development of Photon. One example is tab unloading, which now seems instantaneous even though it happens in the background after the closing animation is completed.

I guess I'll wait a while before I make the switch, but I am excited to get back to Firefox (been a user for more than 10 years, with only a few pauses to use Chrome when it's been significantly better).

I switched from Chrome since it makes my computer freeze and glitch. Like, I launch it and it does that instantly. The only browser that works good for me is Firefox. Now, I would blame my feeble old iMac, but my friend with new PC has experienced the same thing.

Same here, I used to use Firefox in high school before chrome. It was awesome. Chrome got released, I tried it out and sorta just stick with it. A year or so ago I thought hey, let me try Firefox again. Oh man, it was really slow, clunky and just 'in my face' constantly. I might try it again once these improvements are released.

I mean, I would argue a web browser is one of the most valuable tools a developer can have in their belt. It’s a source of research for one, and most developers I know, including myself, usually have a good 20 or so tabs open at minimum when serious research is being done. Outside of that, there’s web development, of course, but that doesn’t apply to everyone.

How well does it compare to Safari on macOS in terms of memory usage and battery usage? Chrome has always been a battery and memory hog for me and I simply switched to Safari over a year ago. I am not sure if things are different these days.

I noticed after +200 bookmarks that I often never visit the old bookmarks anymore.

Since then I switched to a local "translator" that translates my input into remote websites. It is a bit more work to maintain this manually rather than click-click, but in the long run, it works everywhere, all the time, even without firefox.

These comments have been a real eye-opener for me. I mean, at most, all I ever have is 1 tab for mail, 1 for reddit, 1 for the comments, and 1 for the actual article open at one time. So I always thought "who the fuck would actually have move than 4-5 tabs open at a time?", but apparently 100+ seems quite normal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

While working on bigger projects with multiple components I'll usually have a ton of docs open for various modules/libraries/language stdlib. Managing is actually "I know what I'm looking for more or less, jump to tab with X docs -> if not here, open a new tab next to that and Google what I need, leave open if it looks useful soon". Getting to 150 is kinda rare, average is about 30-50.

The position argument is solid, but if you have over a thousand tabs, you probably hardly remember what was "up there" on the oldest ones. On forum pages, most forums support notifications/scrolling to the first unread post, without you having to periodically visit that post to see nothing new was written there. If it's a page visited often enough, browsers will often suggest that page if entered by name in the address bar (in Chromium, at least, and that keeps a few forum threads I frequent handy without bookmarks).

Also, bookmarks don't keep your navigation history. That may not seem important to you, but it's very useful when researching things; as in: "how did I get to this page on this site?" Backtrack a couple steps and "oh yeah, that's a mistake" or "oh yeah, I didn't think of that". Really it's just so useful.

I'm a tab hoarder (though not anywhere near OP's extent, currently 30 tabs across 5 windows), bookmarks never worked for me, they're painful to maintain and too far tucked away for me to remember to invoke them.

For me, bookmarks is where links go to die, if I bookmark something unless it's in the (highly limited) always visible bookmarks bar I'll never find (let alone visit) them again.

If you have duplicates its likely because you visit the page often right? If you're on a bookmarked page you can click the bookmark to see how often it was bookmarked. You can remove all from there and then re-bookmark the page if you want.

I don't know of any batch tools but I wouldn't be surprised if they exist.

What happens is that I'm afraid of losing my tabs because I have a lot, they are important to my work, and I've been burned numerous times in the past when ff crashed or I just quit and it failed to restore the session. I know the article says it has been extremely reliable for the author for a long time but I still don't trust it. So before I quit Firefox, usually to reboot my machine for patches, I right click on the tabs and "bookmark all tabs" and name that folder of bookmarks with the date like 2017-07-22 for today. Do that every few weeks and over the course of years you get a lot of duplicate bookmarks. So I would like to clean that up.

Yeah, I do the same thing. Though, more in order to fix the lag on firefox. I'm not a patient type. If the firefox UI does not respond instantaneously (<100 ms) then I'm instantly aggravated. And in my experience it's only been getting worse. I have an instance of FF 29 I go back to every once and a while and it's always far faster even with twice as many tabs. I definitely can't watch any flash content on firefox as it behaves like I'm trying to run crisis on a Pentium II.

Gripes aside, I hope that firefox really is getting better. I'm nearing the point where I'm considering abandoning firefox.

In any case, to keep my bookmarks clean I've simply made a habit out bookmarking any page I visit and find to have bookmarks. Worked well enough for me personally so I never sought a duplicate removal tool.

The first really big "something something Rust" coming to Firefox is Stylo, which is Servo's parallel CSS parser and style engine. The Quantum CSS project has already landed it in the Nightly release channel, but it is off by default for now while they continue to improve its completeness and performance.

Yeah, the day the pref landed was before certain perf fixes had landed (we had some really bad cache behavior for some things), and also before a bunch of crashes were fixed, so that experience wasn't as great. I'm much happier with it now.

I don't care how fast they make it if they don't make it completely compatible with Tree Style Tabs (without shims or any other kind of trickery) and the other major addons. Honestly, they should implement it natively and by default. It is objectively superior to horizontal tabs, since most desktop users use widescreen monitors. It would be a bold step and once people tried it I'm sure they could never do without it; Firefox could mainstream it just like they did tabs in general. I really think users are smart enough by now to grasp the concept of tabs without having the presentation mimic real-life folder tabs.

I switched to Chrome a few months ago from Firefox. I found the Chrome opens and loads faster on my rig, but it's a ram hog. I would totally migrate back if FF manages to open and run just as fast as Chrome. I don't have a lot of tabs open most of the time, so it's more base performance for me.

Like probably many people, I use all major browsers daily. I find Firefox the most annoying when I open and that asshole scrollbar says updating. Why aren't you doing this in the background? My work machine will run for a month or two without a reboot. Patch and kick it during that other 14 hours I'm not sitting there. Edge is shit on alot, it doesn't have a fuckton of extensions (which I barely use), but it's about the fastest browser to open and get shit done. No, it's not perfect. Suffice to say it's great they're focusing on performance. Credit where credit is due.

They've been focusing on performance for a long time, but I'd say it's only recently that I've noticed a difference in the real world. I just switched to Firefox 56.0 Nightly on Linux, and the speed difference between it and the Firefox 54 was running is colossal. I'm thrilled.

This is the first time in a long time that running Firefox hasn't felt like a sacrifice for the sake of my free software ideals.

And for context, my hardware is mid-range. I've got 12GB of RAM but a traditional hard drive and a processor that was cutting edge in 2010.

(EDIT) Damn it all to hell, with the same browser instance, two days later I had opened and closed a few dozen tabs and moved around, and now it's slow again and using 5GB of RAM between the main process and four web content threads. So much for my enthusiasm. This isn't the first time a switch to Nightly seemed wonderful, and then I figured out that the real killer feature was the nightly restart as part of the upgrades. ($7=%()$&%()$*%

Is memory use really that low for others? With ~8 tabs open and ~5 add-ons active, Nightly with e10s enabled has moved my memory usage from ~900mb to ~2GB on Windows 7. And if you keep going back to when I first started using Nightly ~2 years ago, this same profile was at ~300mb (I switched because Chrome was using >2GB at the time). At this point, I'm really considering switching back...

I jump from topic to topic and usually achieve 400 tabs then have a 8x3 grid to organize tabs for later consumption and use a plugin like session mate? To save all the windows. I'd be surprised if I was the only one to do this.